Hiring For Junior Designers: Here's What We Look Out For

However, looking for the right ones to join the team certainly isn’t the easiest of tasks – as for any other agency out there, we’re sure. Quirky portfolios may hold our attention captive during the initial interview, but we’ve also learnt that fancy prep work doesn’t quite communicate actual competency and creativity in their day-to-day junior designer tasks.

For akïn, we’re always on the lookout for young talent, with the intention of training them and eventually placing them in a leadership role. This calls for characteristics beyond just their technical and creative capabilities.

And if that’s not enough criteria to work with already, we’re also looking for someone who would fit right into our start-up culture, AND become friends with us outside of work. Tall orders for sure.

All that said, here’s a list of characteristics we look out for when hiring Junior Designers!

1. Technical Capabilities

While it’s not everything, software competencies are still very much a huge consideration in qualifying a Junior Designer. We expect, at a most basic level, for them to at least know (and understand!) the basic keyboard shortcuts, naming conventions and functions to get the job done efficiently.

To reduce ambiguity and inconsistency, we’ve created an easy design exercise to judge our junior designers on these competencies. These exercises give us a clearer and more consistent assessment of their technical skills across a number of commonly used tools, while noting how they fare while working under pressure!

2. Creative Thinking (aka Doodling)

From our experience working with designers, we’ve learnt that these random doodles do tell a lot about a person (not that good drawings would equate to great designers – they’re totally different things here!). Besides giving us an otherwise unobtainable insight into their minds, these works also show their fun and quirky side (and we’re areally fun-loving bunch).

We also have a couple of creative exercises devised that allows us to test a potential candidate’s ability to think out-of-the-box, as well as their on-the-spot reactivity. They may be super duper random, but that’s what we’re looking for – creative thinking!

3. The Eye for Detail

The devil’s in the details – and there’s no saying more true and applicable than in the world of design. Tidiness goes all the way down to each pixel and pica, even if they aren’t easily noticeable by the naked (and untrained) eye. But trust us when we say it makes the world of a difference.

Something else we look out for is how well they organize their files – logical naming conventions, consistent grouping of layers and the sorting of tools. These are often seen as unnecessary, troublesome and time-consuming, but good designers would know how helpful they are – especially in times when you’re looking for a particular layer in a file originating four months ago, not named “[FA]_DESIGN FOR CLIENT_FINAL_v2_TO PRINT”.

4. Taking Initiative and Being Proactive

In a relatively small team like ours, every member has the potential to contribute in a big way. All of us, regardless of seniority, should take the initiative to think ahead, and to uncover opportunities to improve ourselves and advance the business.

However, this isn’t an easy characteristic to judge. One thing we try do when interviewing a potential hire is to take some basic references from their prior work experiences and school co-curricular activities.

We also make it a point to have them share more about their inspirations and thought processes behind the work in their portfolio. Through this simple exercise, we’ll also be able to find out how they learnt these skills (whether on their own or otherwise), and whether they’re comfortable pushing themselves out of their comfort zones.

5. A Team Player

Working in an agency environment has lots of perks, but also comes with certain downsides not-so-fun-stuff.

Aside from a high pressured and fast-paced environment, client management can also get a littlefrustrating at times. In such scenarios, we’d want to look out for someone who is able to work well with other team members, and soldiers on with a positive attitude despite despondent times (i.e: nobody appreciates a pessimist constantly reminding them how terrible the situation is).

But how can we tell that from just one interview? By prompting them to tell us about their experiences working in a team (even for projects in school), we can draw out information through they way they describe their experiences and work processes. Be sure to also look out for how much (or how little) they credit or discredit the rest of the team.

In her role as AKÏN’s chief Brand Marketing Officer, Elizabeth manages AKÏN’s key marketing assets and works towards growing AKÏN as a market leader through strategic partnerships. She has also collaborated with researchers and marketers to develop AKÏN’s Human Brand Methodology framework, as a way of helping clients realise the importance of cultivating a culture of empathy, good storytelling and consistent communication. In future, she endeavours to educate the industry with the values and knowledge derived from the framework through brand marketing.

Elizabeth has a degree in Social Science (Communications and New Media) from the National University of Singapore. She is also passionate about helping organisations further develop their brand storytelling strategies by designing human-centered campaigns anchored in integrated marketing. She has previously managed accounts for brands such as Gong Cha, NTU MSc TIP and V-Key.

Beyond the confines of the office, she enjoys learning new skills and developing new interests, and has since picked up pottery, photography, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, programming, Japanese and Thai. Her first loves, however, are still: tennis, yoga, and Clash Royale.